The Closure of Auschwitz but Not Its End

In these and other cases, recourse is had to values such as "empathy" and other local and intimate values, as if they were adequate to the global dimensions of the issue or as if these were all that were left us in the wake of Auschwitz. This is most explicitly the case with regard to one of the best known of such efforts: Zygmunt Bauman's Modernity and the Holocaust, which ends by arguing for "moral duty" as the "essential human responsibility for the Other," against Enlightenment rationality and ethics (a position he has gone on to develop in his recent work on postmodern ethics).(17) Most recently, Omer Bartov, in Murder in Our Midst, connects the conditions of modern warfare ("industrial killing") with genocide without ever finding it necessary to explain what the two world wars were about. It is therefore not surprising, then, that although Bartov contends that "[i]f there is any single lesson to be drawn specifically from the Holocaust, it is precisely that our own society, our political and economic institutions, as well as mass and individual psychology, contain the possibility of another such genocide," he can offer little more than "a plea for understanding and compassion."(18) Contrary to critiques of this position which contest its "extremeness" or "one-sidedness,"(19) what seems to me most problematic about these arguments is that regardless of their seemingly "shattering" claims regarding all of our social institutions, in the end they return to fairly commonplace liberal, privatistic values. The reason for this is that for all their apparent radicality, theories of modernity which treat it as an autonomous cultural form inevitably leave plenty of room for countervailing values which are "fortunately" already available. [Auschwitz] once again becomes other to "normal" everyday life in the "liberal democracies."
Even the more explicitly radical attempts at theorizing Auschwitz in relation to modernity reach similar limits. Of several important such attempts in the volume Probing the Limits of Representation, I will focus briefly on Sande Cohen's essay as the most symptomatic. Cohen goes furthest in rooting modernity in capitalism and its antagonism to both rational discourse and democracy in his critique of Jürgen Habermas's "disciplinary" defense of modernity in his intervention within the German "Historians' Debate." However, Cohen prefers a Lyotardian rather than a Marxist critique of capitalism, positing as a form of resistance a pragmatics of "dissensus" which resists "discipline," "historicization" and even "socialization."(20) The problem is that Lyotard's pragmatics of dissensus is not less an apology for late capitalism than is Habermas's "communication." For example, in discussing the "differend" existing in the capital - labor relation, he asserts that "in the case of language, recourse is made to another family of phrases; but in the case of work, recourse is not made to another family of work, recourse is still made to another family of phrases."(21) Not only is "language capable of admitting these new phrase families,"(22) but capitalism ensures that it is especially equipped to do so: as Lyotard argues in The Postmodern Condition, the raising of knowledge to the major force of production in contemporary capitalism not only links power, knowledge and capital more tightly within a network of "terror," but also, through a process of "complexification" allows for indeterminate spaces within science that allow for "paralogies" (new, unexpected moves within increasingly advanced knowledge games) which can resist "terror."(23) Lyotard, that is, for all the apparent radicality of his critique of capitalism as implicated in a terrorizing "consensus," in fact assumes that new spaces of "freedom" and "legitimacy" will develop within, and only within, a more "complex" capitalism.